Interview Time - Tom Hall
6. I'm currently working on re-launching our travel competition and the new prizes for the best entries in this, will be sponsored trips around Europe. Each writer will maintain an online journal and the best writer at the end of it will be awarded a book deal. As an accomplished travel writer what would you advice be to the aspiring word smiths - competing for these prizes?
One of the mistakes that people make when they are writing about travel is that they go over board with the flowery prose. Write like you talk because you'll find that with most people – who have a passion for what they've seen and done – it comes naturally. But if you try and dress it up so that you're writing like Paul Theroux or Jan Morris you don't sound like yourself and it's not interesting. Also write for your audience. The fifty or sixty year old baby boomers are going to be wanting to go on a cruise and are not going to be interested in the budget traveller's tale of not washing for a week, when they went trekking in Honduras. The other thing is the more you can understand the basics of how to structure a feature, the easier you will find it to write one.
7. We do a lot of features on saving money when travellers backpack through London. If you were visiting the British capital on a shoestring budget what would be the things that you couldn't afford - not to do?
I would not put my hand in my pocket to visit St Paul's Cathedral or the Tower of London – I would use the money that I would have spent on the Tower of London to visit some of the less well known medieval churches in London – that's when you really get a sense of history and heritage in the city.
I think you could also not afford - not to hire a bicycle – think of it as a cycle tour. See as many things as you can and fight the traffic – then you're living like a Londoner. Not everyone can go and find lots of people who have lived in London for ages – who can show them the ropes. It's not always easy – so hire a bike and get out there and do that. The last thing is probably to spend a bit of money at somewhere like Borough Market and get yourself a decent picnic - so you're not then allowed to go home and slag off British food. It would be a real shame to have not sampled some light organic cider and get some fresh cooked meats and bread.
8. Back in April I asked Bill Bryson to serve up his top five reads for our monthly book reviews. As a fellow - seasoned - airport dweller – what would your top five books be?
I think that Mr Bryson's book about Britain is a fantastic companion for travelling around the UK. I don't think any book has made me want to travel quite as much as On The Road by Jack Kerouac - even though America today doesn't feel a lot like Kerouac's America, I think the Spirit is still there. I also recommend The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux, which is a lovely book about travelling through Central and South America – a very nice companion for that trip. Lots of travel literature is quite boring so I suppose it's better to have a decent history as a base when you go. I would say Ryzsard Kapuscinski – Travels with Herodotus. He was a fantastic Polish journalist and foreign correspondent, and he deals with travel in ancient times, adds it to his own experiences and uses it to shed light on places like Iraq, Greece and Turkey. My last choice would be Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent by Blaine Harden, because one of things that you simply must do is travel around Africa. It's such a varied and wonderful place but it's also a very difficult place to understand - why things are as they are. Another alternative to that would be a book called I Didn't Do It For You by Michela Wrong.
9. There's a good deal of focus and concern about bio-metric scanning - with information about your corneas and fingerprints being stored on your passport. Do you think that this kind of identification will help to reduce the threat of terrorism and make it easier for people to travel - or - do you think that the prospect of the government knowing absolutely everything about you, will ultimately discourage people from travelling?
Will it make travel safer and more secure? No I don't because I think no matter how much you tighten the noose – if someone is prepared to blow themselves up then there's very, very little that you can do. It is a fact that the most dangerous place at an airport now is before you even have to show your passport – it's in the queue to go through. Will it put people off travelling? I don't think it will because it's just another - additional burden to get through. I think there will be resentment about it but ultimately people are prepared to do what they need to do. I went to a press conference at the UN embassy and the guy from Homeland Security came over. He's a very genuine man and he's motivated by wanting to make sure that America is a safe country for tourists as well as visitors - yet he is constructing iron clad immigration into that country. One of the reasons why is that no-one on passport control wants to be the guy who lets in the next Mohammed Abdul. Now I have a degree of sympathy with that but at the same time it's a bigger question and I think from a traveller's point of view you can see there is a backlash against travel in the United States. How far that goes remains to be seen but I also think that there's a balance to be struck and the world needs to be a different place to what it was ten years ago.
10. From speaking to various tourism boards and travel writers – like yourself, there seems to be a general consensus that the travel industry is incredibly resilient in the face of the current terrorist threat – for example in the aftermath of the London bombings, there was a notable increase in the numbers of backpackers travelling and taking advantage of the cheaper air fares. What do you think it is that drives people to keep on exploring despite the ever increasing risks?
I think it's an awareness that the risks are not as significant as people are making out. For example the safest time to travel to Egypt was the three days after the suicide bomb in Sharm el Sheik. I think travellers are clever. I think they realise if something happens where the knock on effect is cheap fares they will be motivated by bargains. If you get something for not much, people will do it. So I think when people talk about resilience with travellers, yes definitely there is a screw it – let's do it mentality because in a sense that's what's travelling is about – taking the plunge.
11. In the recent Lonely Planet survey about sustainable travel there was a reference to everyone having an annual carbon allowance - into which they must fit their travel. How viable do you think that option would be - at a time when transatlantic travel is becoming more affordable than ever before?
It remains unviable until it is possible to look at your total carbon output in the same way that you look at your total income for the year or your power usage - because it's very hard for people to see the connection between the carbon you use from a coal fired power station and the carbon you expel flying to New York for work. Until people see those connections a little bit more clearly – I'm sure that it's not a viable thing. The level of understanding and urgency isn't there yet. Some airlines have gone some way towards embracing this issue but most other airlines don't see it as an issue and that's because it's only really a big deal in the UK. If you talk to someone in the US about how much carbon airlines generate – they'll laugh at you. It's a very UK-centric issue and that doesn't mean it's not important, in fact I think we're probably ten years ahead of the rest of the world in terns of really confronting it, but the other thing is that in the UK the media has portrayed flying as evil - saying it should be stopped and that you should all feel guilty about it. Well that's ridiculous.
12. On a bit of a lighter note – if you could inhabit the body of any person in the history of mankind – just for a day – who would you take control of and why?
It would have to be someone who had travelled very widely in the past so Marco Polo. He travelled very widely and I suppose if it were any one day it would be a day when he arrived somewhere significant. Maybe when he arrived in the court of Genghis Khan.
13. And finally – what's next for Tom Hall?
Well me and my wife have just had a baby so travel with children and introducing him to some of the wonderful places in the world. Then more of the same.
- Rob Savage
